Treasure Hunt

The downfall of the Getty curator Marion True.

“There was an etiquette I absorbed,” True says. “ The issue of ‘Where did you get this?’ was not discussed.” Photograph by Steve Pyke.

One afternoon in April, 1998, Marion True, the curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, took a flight from Athens to Rome. When she got off the plane, a carabinieri officer was waiting for her. “He actually picked me up before passport control, just to show how important I was,” she recalls. The officer drove her to the Raphael Hotel, near Piazza Navona; in her room, she found a giant bouquet from General Roberto Conforti, then the head of the carabinieri’s cultural-heritage-protection force. Conforti had invited her to address an international police conference that he was hosting, on the circulation of stolen art. “This was his courting phase,” True told me.

Now retired, General Conforti—often called simply Il Generale—is renowned in the international circle of beat cops, private detectives, insurance executives, customs agents, and state prosecutors involved in the recovery of stolen art. In the nineteen-nineties, he built up his squad into the largest of its kind in the world; he also set out to combat what he considered the most intractable problem in art crime. “It wasn’t Picassos, and it wasn’t Caravaggios,” Conforti, who wears a mustache and speaks in a gravelly basso profundo, said when I met him in Rome, this fall. “It was antiquities.” Freshly looted artifacts have no documented history, he pointed out, and criminal organizations were putting them on the international market with impunity; quality pieces could sell for seven or even eight figures. In 1995, True had persuaded the Getty to adopt ethical standards requiring objects proposed for acquisition to have been documented and written about by scholars, and Conforti hoped to enlist her in his efforts to retrieve improperly obtained Italian antiquities from the Getty and other American museums. “We thought the Getty was ready to work with us,” Conforti said.

At the time, True was a frequent participant in Italian archeology conferences, where she talked about the “brutally direct evidence” of looting and about her efforts to change the Getty’s image as the “most aggressively acquiring institution in the world.” (The endowment of the J. Paul Getty Trust is $6.4 billion.) Paola Pelagatti, who is one of Italy’s leading classical archeologists, says of True, “She made a big impression. She was extremely conscientious—direct in that strong American way.” True, who is fair and has striking blue eyes, was also known for her elegant New England manners and her classic wardrobe. “She was very Waspish, very Bostonian,” Mario Bondioli-Osio, an Italian diplomat who in the nineties ran a government commission on art recovery, says. “She kind of fit the Italian ideal of elegance, of the well-turned-out lady,” says John Papadopoulos, a professor of archeology at U.C.L.A. and a former associate curator at the Getty, who travelled with her to Italy on several occasions.

At Conforti’s conference, True addressed a group that included representatives of Scotland Yard, Interpol, the U.S. Customs Service, and the Gendarmerie Nationale. “Among the things I talked about was a big cult statue, the Aphrodite,” True says. Depicting a Greek goddess clad in billowing drapery, the statue was seven and a half feet tall and had been, as True said in her presentation, “one of the museum’s most controversial acquisitions” when it was bought by the Getty from a London dealer, in 1988, for eighteen million dollars. A rare surviving example of late-fifth-century-B.C. sculpture, it had been created in an unusual manner: the covered body was limestone; the exposed head, arms, and feet were white marble. Its provenance was unknown, but reports had circulated in the American and the Italian press that it had been excavated recently at Morgantina, a frequently looted site in central Sicily.

“Despite the best efforts of the press, no evidence has come forward to this day to substantiate its suggested provenance of Morgantina,” True said at the conference. “However, the statue does represent an important document in the history of monumental sculpture.” She continued, “It is most certainly a product of a workshop in the western Greek colonies. For this reason, the museum has agreed to work with Italian colleagues on a complete technical study of the statue.” In an effort to determine the Aphrodite’s origin, True had sent limestone samples to geologists in Palermo. (The samples matched limestone found in Sicily, but the geologists could not identify a specific site.) In her presentation, True also mentioned several objects that the Getty had voluntarily repatriated after the museum determined that they had been stolen or illegally exported. Her lecture was applauded. “She spoke well,” Conforti recalls.

Today, True, who is fifty-nine, is best known as the target of a sprawling carabinieri investigation of American museums and the illegal antiquities market. In April, 2005, she was indicted in Rome, charged with conspiracy to traffic in tens of millions of dollars’ worth of looted Greek vases, Etruscan bronzes, terracottas, and other objects. True allegedly obtained these artifacts through an international network run by the American antiquities dealer Robert E. Hecht, Jr., who is a co-defendant in her case, and by an Italian dealer named Giacomo Medici, who was convicted of trafficking in 2004, and who was described in his sentencing documents as perpetrating “one of the greatest thefts against the Italian state ever recorded.” According to the prosecution, the conspiracy involved top dealers and private collectors in London and New York, along with art restorers in Zurich, middlemen in Geneva, and tomb robbers and smugglers in Italy. True denies any wrongdoing.

“Marion True had a double nature,” Paolo Giorgio Ferri, the state prosecutor in the Italian case, says. “Not Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but very similar.” Weeks before the trial began, in the fall of 2005, True lost her job at the Getty, after she disclosed that she had taken a loan from Lawrence Fleischman, a well-known antiquities collector based in New York, to help pay for a vacation home on the Greek island of Paros; she obtained the loan just days after Fleischman’s collection, which he had amassed with his wife, Barbara, was acquired by the museum, in a deal worth sixty million dollars. In March and April, 2006, Greek police conducted a series of raids on the Paros house, and confiscated ancient stone objects and architectural fragments that they found on the premises. True was subsequently indicted in Athens on charges of trafficking three Greek antiquities owned by the Getty, including a fourth-century-B.C. gold wreath; the Getty has returned all three to Greece.

At the center of these investigations is the Aphrodite, which, like True, has been transformed from pristine goddess to corrupting siren—a symbol of the cupidity and lawlessness of American museums in the face of exquisite loot. Italian officials have presented the story of the cult statue—its passage from Switzerland to London and then Los Angeles, the exorbitant price the Getty paid for it, and the persistent rumors that it was looted from Morgantina—as typical of the Getty’s corrupt practices during True’s tenure. And although the Getty’s administration recently entered a détente with the Italian government, the criminal trial of True and Hecht continues, and True could face a maximum prison term of twenty years if the conspiracy charges are upheld. (Hecht, who also maintains his innocence, is eighty-eight, and cannot be sentenced to jail, under Italian law, because of his age.)

“Sometimes I think it is almost a case of mistaken identity,” True said when we met earlier this year. Since leaving the Getty, True and her husband, Patrick de Maisonneuve, a retired French architectural historian, have been living in a small town on the west coast of France, and on Paros. The Paros house, which I visited in September, is a two-bedroom white stucco farmhouse, probably dating from the nineteenth century; the estate, including the property and various furnishings, was valued at four hundred thousand dollars when True bought it, in 1995. It occupies a terraced, walled enclosure on an inland hillside; the neighbors are local farmers who raise chickens and goats. The rooms are modest but elegant, with Indonesian wood furniture. There is a small swimming pool and the sea can be glimpsed in the distance.

During her career, True thought of the house as a refuge from the international museum scene; today, the serenity is a reminder that the world she used to escape from is gone. “Many of the people who were friends I will never hear from again and, frankly, I don’t want to hear from anymore,” she said. When she is not dealing with her lawyers in Athens and Rome, True cooks, practices piano, and gardens; one of the alleged antiquities confiscated from the house by the Greek police was an old stone box that she had planted with geraniums. Speaking of the charges against her, she said, “There is something horrifying about being accused as a criminal in two different countries that I spent my life promoting.”

In 1986, when True became curator of antiquities, the Getty Museum had a billion-dollar bank account and a provincial reputation. It occupied a kitschy replica of a Roman villa, in Malibu, and was known for spending indiscriminately on second-tier Old Master paintings and on ancient Greek and Roman art that not infrequently turned out to be of far more recent vintage. The Getty’s first antiquities curator, Jiri Frel, left his post in 1984 after a series of acquisition scandals. Most embarrassing, Frel had successfully pushed for the purchase of a stone kouros—a statue of a young man—that many experts now consider a modern forgery. Like other scholars, True held a low opinion of the Getty’s antiquities collection. “It wasn’t a question of provenance,” she says. “It was a question of quality and value. The collection was sort of a joke. The museum was sort of a joke.” True’s goal was to bring the Getty’s unpedigreed antiquities department into the classical-art establishment.

Born in 1948, True grew up in Newburyport, in eastern Massachusetts, in modest circumstances. Her mother had encouraged an early interest in ancient Greece, developed from books and from occasional trips to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. “It was not just the idea of the artifacts and what they represented—the age and aesthetic attraction,” she says. “I loved mythology. I had all my own ideas about what Greece must have been like. In the first grade, my costume for Halloween was a little toga.”

True won a scholarship to New York University, where she majored in classics and fine arts, and she attended graduate school at the Institute of Fine Arts and then at Harvard. Before attending Harvard, she worked in the department of classical art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which had been run since the fifties by Cornelius Vermeule. She also studied with Dietrich von Bothmer, a formidable scholar of Greek vases, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She wrote her dissertation on pre-Sotadean statuette vases—wheel-made pottery enhanced by molded sculptural features. “Boston has, I think, the most beautiful of these vases in existence—a figure of an Amazon mounted on a horse,” True says.

At the M.F.A., True met Hecht, who was a friend of Vermeule’s, and other prominent dealers who visited the museum. Taking time off from graduate school, she worked briefly for Stanley Moss, an Old Masters dealer in New York. “I was a miserable dealer,” she says. “I never wanted to sell anything I liked to someone I didn’t like.”

In 1982, she joined the Getty as a curatorial assistant. At first, she was not directly involved in purchases, but she demonstrated a good eye for material, particularly in her field of Greek vases. “It was unusual for someone that young to have such strong scholarly credentials, and also be knowledgable about the market,” John Walsh, who was the director of the Getty during most of True’s tenure, recalls; he promoted her to curator in 1986, the year she received her Ph.D.

During her training, True said, it hadn’t occurred to her that there might be something unethical about museums acquiring antiquities: this was an essential task of any growing institution, and one for which she had been enthusiastically groomed by Vermeule. (Michael Padgett, a curator of ancient art at the Princeton University Art Museum, who trained at the M.F.A., told me, “When somebody asked Cornelius what his collecting policy was, he would look at them and smile and say, ‘I was trained as an attack dog.’ ”) The most prominent dealers were considered connoisseurs themselves, and the long tradition of art-market secrecy meant that they rarely disclosed their suppliers. “There was a kind of etiquette I absorbed,” True says. “The issue of ‘Where did you get this?’ was not discussed.”

Outside the world of curators and collectors, however, this etiquette had been challenged. In 1972, Bothmer was involved in a controversy over a red-figure calyx krater, which the Met acquired from Robert Hecht for a then record million dollars. The vase, which is signed by the Athenian artist Euphronios and depicts a scene from the Iliad, had come with a Lebanese provenance, but reports from Italy indicated that it had been recently looted from Cerveteri, an Etruscan site north of Rome. (The Etruscans were among the leading importers of Greek vases.) Some archeologists said that the Met was fuelling the plunder of Etruscan sites, and that the vase’s archeological context had been erased. By focussing on aesthetic qualities alone, they argued, the museum had eliminated the possibility of studying the vase as part of a specific burial. Bothmer responded that knowing the vase’s final resting spot in antiquity was far less important than having it at the Met, where it could be studied alongside other outstanding examples of Attic pottery. “Through its purchase our holdings in this fascinating field have taken on a new significance,” he wrote. “Conversely, this newcomer would lose some of its meaning if it could not be seen and studied in the proper context.” At the time, the Italian authorities were unable to prove that the krater had been looted, and True, as an aspiring young classicist, found Bothmer’s argument more persuasive. “There weren’t many Greek temples around Newburyport,” she says. “I got my exposure from museums.”

Shortly after True became curator at the Getty, a well-known London dealer named Robin Symes called to say that he had something he wanted to show her, in a warehouse in the Battersea district. What she saw was a larger-than-life-size statue of a Greek goddess that dominated the room. True sensed immediately that it was a work influenced by late Athenian classicism. “The sophistication of the carving was amazing,” she recalls. “In terms of not only the modelling of the drapery but the incorporation of movement in the drapery and the sense of atmosphere around the figure. With other sculptures, one feels the imposing nature of them. This one really had dynamism built into the stone.”

True had never experienced a work of art in quite this way: “It was something that provoked you. You really felt this is what, when you stood in front of a cult statue, you were intended to feel.” Fifth-century-B.C. Greek sculpture was rare enough, but a work this fine, and finely preserved, was almost one of a kind. True consulted with several scholars; they shared her enthusiasm. “Martin Robertson”—an Oxford scholar—“was very cute,” True recalls. “We went to see it, we had lunch, and then we went back. He said, ‘Let’s do like the Persians: First, we discuss it when we’re sober. Now that we’ve had some wine, let’s go look at it and discuss it again.’ ”

The Getty began to consider buying the cult statue. But the provenance presented a dilemma: Symes claimed that it had belonged to the family of a Swiss grocery magnate since the nineteen-thirties, yet it had never been on exhibit or studied by scholars, and its origin was unknown.

In October, 1987, in an internal Getty memo, True wrote, “The market in antiquities is perhaps the most corrupt and problematic aspect of the international art trade. Accepting the premise that the majority of antiquities on the market were likely to have been removed from their countries of origin illegally, can we justify collecting these objects at all?” She answered that the Getty could, “without compromising either personal or institutional standards for ethical behavior.” As True explained, if museums didn’t collect, important objects lacking provenance might disappear into private hands or a storeroom, and never be studied. “Given these alternatives, purchase by the Getty Museum under conscientious guidelines, followed by prompt exhibition and publication, may be the best possible outcome for such an object.”

True viewed the problem as an ethical rather than a legal matter. “Aggrieved governments have had little success in the prosecution of either accused smugglers or dealers, and they have too little evidence to win most cases against large institutions for repatriation of objects believed stolen,” she wrote. But she took museums to task for their tendency to “hide the material for a period of time to allow any interest in its whereabouts to die down, and then place it quietly on exhibition.” (At the time, the Met was embroiled in a dispute with the government of Turkey over the so-called Lydian Hoard, a group of silver and gold objects acquired by the museum in the late sixties; much of it was kept in storage until 1984. Turkey produced evidence that the objects were looted, and the Met later returned the collection.)

A month later, the Getty adopted a policy requiring it to notify the relevant foreign governments whenever a work was being considered for purchase. If valid information emerged that an object had been illegally removed from its country of origin, the museum would return it, regardless of how much time had passed. The Getty was the first large American collecting institution to be receptive to the Mediterranean countries’ concerns.

True and the Getty administration resolved to use the cult statue as a test of the new policy. In August, 1987, the museum had sent photographs of the statue to the Italian culture ministry, and, three months later, the ministry responded that “following research undertaken at the relevant offices of this administration, no information has emerged concerning the provenance and authenticity of the object.” Later that year, the statue arrived in Malibu for analysis by Getty conservators, and in the spring of 1988 True prepared a formal acquisition proposal for the Getty’s board. She compared the statue, which she identified as likely a depiction of the Greek goddess Aphrodite, to the Parthenon marbles, and suggested that it would be the most important work of Greek sculpture outside Greece and Great Britain. She wrote that the “find spot” was unknown, but that the technique and style of construction suggested a Greek artist working in Sicily or southern Italy.

In June, 1988, just as the deal was being closed, a reporter for Connoisseur, a magazine that had run several articles critical of the Getty, informed the museum of a story circulating among Sicilian looters that the statue came from the Morgantina site. True got in touch with Malcolm Bell, the University of Virginia archeologist who directed excavations there. “Although we do not wish to be at the mercy of every journalist’s unfounded attack, we also do not wish to pursue the acquisition in obvious disregard for the laws of Italy,” she wrote. Bell responded a week later, saying that, although he could not rule out the theory, “I know of no reason to argue that it was found at Morgantina.” A few weeks later, the Getty purchased the sculpture from Symes.

The carabinieri were unimpressed by the Getty’s due diligence. “The Getty said it had written the ministry about it,” General Conforti told me. “But how can you respond without doing verification on the ground?” Within days of the deal’s close, Italian police contacted Interpol and the U.S. Customs Service to get more information about the statue’s circulation in the market; a telegram was also sent to the Getty by a Sicilian superintendent of antiquities, stating that a police investigation was under way. The carabinieri began investigating tomb robbers in Sicily, and in August, 1988, London police interviewed Symes on behalf of Interpol. Still, the case seemed to stall. “We never heard from them,” True says of the carabinieri.

That fall, the Italian culture ministry sent Adriano La Regina, then the archeological superintendent of Rome, to Los Angeles to evaluate the sculpture. “Marion gave me a very warm reception,” La Regina recalls. “We talked about whether it came from Greece or from Italy, on stylistic grounds, and I had the idea that it could have come from Sicily or Taranto”—a town in southern Italy. In a report, La Regina wrote, “Dr. True is open to a collaboration aimed at determining . . . the provenance of the sculpture.” He added that True believed this research was necessary to arrive at an “appropriately detailed publication of the object.” True also explained to him the value of having the Aphrodite at the Getty. “I talked with him about how important it was to have a piece of that quality and that impressive nature on view in Los Angeles, where there are millions of people who will never go to Italy or Greece,” True says. “He was very moved by this. It was actually over the big cult statue that Adriano and I became friends.”

In the late eighties, the Getty’s budget for acquisitions dwarfed other institutions’—in 1989, it was more than a hundred million dollars, compared with the Met’s mere seventeen million. True’s department alone sometimes spent more than ten million dollars annually, and she was encouraged to travel to Europe four or five times a year just to keep abreast of the trade. “When I would go to London, for example, I would go to most of the dealers—the big-timers and the small-timers,” she says. “Not because they had sold anything to the museum but because I thought it was my job to be in touch and to know what’s on the market. But I also knew that, for the types of objects we were looking for, there was a fairly limited number of people who consistently had them.”

During the acquisition of the Aphrodite, True had become friends with Symes and his companion, Christos Michaelides. “They made being a collector part of a whole world,” True says. “They were very much involved in the lives of the people they sold to—as much friends as they were dealers.” True saw them whenever she was in London, and when she was in Greece she attended dinner parties at their villa on Schinoussa. “They owned a peninsula,” True says. “When you arrived, the peninsula would have two or three giant yachts tied up. And all of a sudden there would be fifteen or twenty people. At first, everyone would be standing around having cocktails, laughing, telling whatever news there was to tell. Then everyone went to different tables for dinner. After dinner, there might be dancing, there might be music. It was just a jolly evening.” The socializing was important for True’s job—she was often in intense competition with the private collectors who were Symes’s principal clients—but it also had its own appeal. “I have to say, I enjoyed it,” she says. “I enjoyed these people.”

In the late eighties, True met the New York collectors Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, who were important clients of Symes’s and had been filling their East Side duplex with spectacular examples of classical art. Fleischman was a successful dealer in American art from Detroit, and he and his wife were prominent patrons of the Met and other museums. (Lawrence Fleischman died in 1997.)

“Larry was apt to call me up and say, ‘Symes was just in and he showed me a bronze—you know it?’ ” True says. “And if I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve seen it,’ he would ask, ‘Why didn’t you buy it?’ He was very worried. If I’d seen it and didn’t buy it, there was something wrong with it. But Larry was more likely to invite me over for a drink to see him and Barbara, and he would have right in front, in the entrance hall, his latest acquisition. To sort of say, ‘See what I got and you didn’t get offered!’ And he was happier to have trumped me.”

Occasionally, True’s friendship with Symes, an extravagant man, put her in complicated situations. Barbara Fleischman told me about a dinner that Symes once hosted for True, in the mid-nineties: “Symes says, ‘We have a surprise, Marion’s having a birthday.’ And he takes out a box, and hands it to Marion, and in it is a very beautiful lapis-lazuli necklace. And she looked at it, and said, ‘Oh, it’s beautiful!’ and put it back in the box and said, very quietly, ‘I don’t think so, I can’t accept it.’ Later, she told me, ‘I will go to their place for lunch, I will be taken out to dinner. But I will never be their house guest, and I will never be on their premises overnight. Or any dealer’s.’ She had a very strong moral code.” (True says she so loved the necklace that she eventually arranged to buy it, for some twelve hundred dollars, from the New York jeweller who had sold it to Symes.)

Another dealer whom True befriended was Giacomo Medici. She had been introduced to Medici in 1984, at an auction in Basel. “I didn’t know who he was, but people were chattering,” she says. “He was bidding a lot, and he was flashing this smile around.” Afterward, True and some colleagues went to the Euler Hotel. “He came in to buy champagne for everybody—that’s the way Giacomo was.” Medici did not have special training in classical art, or possess the social connections of the more established museum dealers. He also spoke very little English. “Medici was a real bandit, not an antiquarian,” Paola Pelagatti, the archeologist, says. But True, who speaks little Italian, says that she did not sense anything awry: “He had opened a gallery in Geneva. The Getty had bought things from him in the past, including things that he had bought at auction.” He had also done business with well-known dealers like Robert Hecht. True kept in touch.

In the spring of 1987, True met with Medici and Hecht at Medici’s showroom, in Geneva. They showed her two Etruscan bronzes, a tripod and a tall candelabrum. True was interested, and the objects were sent to the Getty for consideration. Shortly thereafter, True wrote to Medici in Italian—the text, she says, was translated by her secretary—that she hoped “to be able to acquire” the objects “within the next year.” But the Getty did not buy them until 1990, and then it dealt exclusively with Hecht’s New York gallery, Atlantis Antiquities. In the acquisition documents, Atlantis Antiquities declared that the objects had been acquired in Geneva in 1985, and legally exported; no mention was made of Medici.

According to Ferri, the Italian prosecutor, these negotiations are part of a pattern that was repeated during True’s tenure: True corresponded directly with Medici about desired objects, but his name never appeared in the Getty acquisition files. In 1995, Italian and Swiss police launched the first of several raids on Medici’s Geneva warehouse, in which they discovered thousands of ancient artifacts and photographs of ancient artifacts—many of the pictured objects were sporca di terra, or “dirty with earth,” and had ended up at the Getty and other museums, via Symes or Hecht. Both the bronze tripod and the candelabrum were traced to the Guglielmi Collection, a well-known private collection in Rome, from which they apparently had been stolen. (The Getty has returned both objects.) In 2004, Medici was sentenced in Rome to ten years in prison and fined ten million euros for antiquities smuggling. Claiming innocence, he is appealing his sentence.

Ferri argues that True’s letters to Medici, which are written in a “very friendly” style unusual in Italian business correspondence, show she was aware of his illicit dealings. In a January, 1992, letter that has figured prominently in the investigation, True thanked Medici for “the information on the provenance of our three fragmentary proto-Corinthian olpai”—earthenware pitchers. “To know that they came from Cerveteri and the area of Monte Abatone is very helpful for the research of one of my staff members.” She enclosed a catalogue of vases in the Getty collection, noting, “I think that you will find many pieces included that you will recognize.” She went on to say, “I intend to be in Rome” in February, and again a few weeks later, and “I hope that we will be able to get together and have some further discussions about future acquisitions.” For Ferri, these statements expose True’s collusion with Medici to buy looted Italian artifacts. “It’s a smoking gun,” he says.

But True says that she had no reason to avoid contact with Medici, who was not suspected of any crime at the time: “It was not an intentional covering up. Otherwise the letters in our files wouldn’t have existed.” She sent the catalogue to Medici, she told me, because the Getty had just published it, and it included pieces that had been acquired from Medici’s Geneva gallery by her predecessors. The three olpai discussed in her letter had been acquired years earlier by Jiri Frel, without any records. “We had simply been trying to find out who sold the vases to Frel,” she says. “What I got back from Medici was where he said the vases had been found.” A specialist in proto-Corinthian vases had suggested, on stylistic grounds, that the olpai came from Vulci, a site northwest of Rome, and True and her staff concluded that Medici’s information was unreliable. “With a lot of things dealers say or repeat, you don’t necessarily know what the source of that information is,” True says. “With the Medici photographs, all of a sudden we knew Medici was working with people who were excavating.”

True says that in 1991 she met Medici in Rome, while she was attending an academic conference. Medici introduced her to his daughter, who wanted to study archeology, and they had dinner. (The daughter spoke English and “translated,” she says.) She says that they did not discuss acquisitions, and claims that the purpose of her flattering letters to Medici and other dealers was to maintain good relations with sources in the market. Harold Williams, the former president of the Getty Trust, says of the carabinieri, “What they discovered was correspondence with Marion. And that was Marion doing her job. I expected her to.”

When I asked True if she ever had suspicions about Medici, she said, “I did not have a sense of Giacomo being shady.” Speaking of Medici’s showroom, she joked, “It was not, you know, crates of stuff with the dirt coming off of it. It was a staid office with a desk.” She did remember one awkward encounter, in the early nineties. He had asked her to meet him in a bank vault in Geneva, where he showed her some objects, including some fragments by the Attic vase painter known as the Berlin Painter which had once been part of a vase that was now in the Getty’s collection. Medici then pulled out another vase fragment. “It was beautiful,” True recalled. “And he said, ‘That’s for Marion!’ ” To True, it felt like a bribe. “I said, ‘No, Giacomo, if we buy these fragments for the krater, you can give this to the museum. But it’s not for me.’ That was an uncomfortable thing.” (Medici maintains that this was a misunderstanding.) The museum did not buy the fragments, and True says that she did not meet Medici again until 2005, at one of her court hearings: “He was very elegantly dressed, and he came over to me and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ It’s not something anyone else has ever said to me. Whatever else you can say, there is a kind of gentlemanliness about him.”

In 1990, Dietrich von Bothmer was about to retire from the Met, and True’s enterprising record at the Getty had caught the attention of the Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello. “She knew the whole breadth of the field of Greek and Roman art,” de Montebello recalled recently. “She had contacts with a lot of collectors—people like the Fleischmans. She also did very good installations.” De Montebello offered her Bothmer’s job. True was tempted. “I had always thought I wanted to go back to the East Coast,” she says. At the time, the Getty was spending $1.2 billion on a new building, in Los Angeles, designed by Richard Meier, and had decided to transform its original home, the Roman villa in Malibu, into a museum for classical antiquities. True took the Met’s offer to Getty officials, who promised her a directing role in the villa project. She would be building a museum as well as a collection: “It’s a pretty rare thing when you can do everything—ceilings, walls, the inner support structure, gorgeous terrazzo floors—and then design the cases so that they fit with the rest of your architecture.” She decided to stay.

One of the primary challenges of the Getty Villa was coming up with a selection of classical art sufficiently representative to justify a stand-alone museum. Unlike her peers at older institutions, True didn’t have much of an inventory to draw on. “Early on, I went to Greece and talked to the head of the culture ministry about lending us material from the basements of the national museums,” True recalls. “He thought I was a pushy American woman.” Laws in Italy and Greece that treated antiquities as national patrimony also made it virtually impossible for foreign museums to borrow them.

In 1991, True delivered a provocative paper before a group of Italian and Greek scholars in Rome. “Archeologists in both the art-rich nations and the collecting nations abroad are particularly vehement in their condemnation of collectors and collecting institutions, most often blaming them for the destruction of sites and contexts,” she said. “Yet when we examine the current condition of the sites of legitimate archeological excavations, we often find them neglected and crumbling.” She noted that some collections in Italy and Greece had been inaccessible to visitors for “more than a decade,” and that, in Rome and Athens, thousands of pieces recovered from professional digs remained uncatalogued, unrestored, and unavailable to scholars. (“In the National Archeological Museum of Athens, there was a room about a third the size of a football field, with Attic grave stelae, funerary lekythoi, loutrophoroi,” True told me. “These pieces were never on view, not cleaned, not conserved.”)

True then made a proposal: “One thing that the art-rich nations might do if they sincerely wish to discourage the illicit traffic is to offer the collecting institutions the option of applying their acquisition funds to excavations and to allow them once again to have a share of the finds for exhibition. Today’s institutions are enlightened enough to recognize that ownership is not essential, but having interesting, exhibitable material is.” She added, “If good, genuine objects are available to collectors and collecting institutions abroad on extended loan, by exchange, or by legitimate purchase, the demand for material that now fuels the black market will all but cease to exist.”

The speech caused a stir. “The Greeks especially gave me hell,” she recalls. “I mean, who was I to criticize their museums?” Some Italian scholars shared her views, and pressed the Italian government to liberalize its lending policies. But, as Adriano La Regina recalls, “There was huge resistance. Many thought that it would empty out Italian museums.”

The Getty continued to build its collection, but True realized that the museum’s activities in the antiquities market made it difficult for scholars in Italy and Greece to work with her. “Somehow, we had to respect what they were doing if we wanted them to respect what we were doing,” she says. In consultation with colleagues, True decided that it was time to limit ancient-art acquisitions to objects that had previously been written about by scholars and were known to the archeological community. The requirement rendered off limits most objects on the market. The policy change, which eventually prompted Conforti to invite her to speak at the Rome international police conference, was the first of its kind for a large American collecting museum. As True said at a conference at Rutgers University a few years later, “This new amendment brought our period of aggressive collecting to an end.”

In the summer of 1994, True was visiting her friend Stella Lubsen, a Dutch archeologist, on Paros, where Lubsen and her husband had a vacation home, when she learned that a beautiful old house nearby was coming on the market. “I had never owned a house before,” True says. “I always planned to retire to Greece, and so when this house became available I was desperate to have it. I said to Stella, ‘I don’t want anyone to have this house but me.’ And I spent the next year figuring out how I was going to do this.”

As with some of her spectacular acquisitions for the Getty, the house purchase would require True to reconcile aesthetic desire with complex financial, legal, and moral considerations. The house was comfortable but not lavish; the Lubsens, moreover, could lend her the money for a down payment. But, as a foreigner, True could not qualify for a Greek mortgage, and American banks refused to lend her money for a house overseas. It occurred to her that her wealthy collector friends the Fleischmans might be able to arrange a loan, but the Getty was preparing a major travelling exhibition of their collection. Soon after she returned from Paros that fall, she asked John Walsh about it. “He commented that it would be problematic, that it could be misinterpreted,” she says. “I heeded John’s advice.”

She brought up the house with the companion of the dealer Robin Symes, Christos Michaelides, who was the well-connected scion of a Greek shipping family. She recalls, “Christos said, ‘There is a lawyer in Piraeus named Dimitrios Peppas, who arranges loans for shipping companies. Why don’t you talk to him?’ ” True went to see Peppas, who set up for her a four-year loan at eighteen per cent interest. She accepted and, in the summer of 1995, bought the house. “The idea was that it would give me time to find a longer mortgage,” she recalls. But by the spring of 1996 the high-interest Greek loan had become onerous, and she was worried that she might lose the house.

Around this time, True achieved one of the major triumphs of her career: the Fleischmans decided to offer their antiquities collection to the Getty. Several museums had competed for the collection, and many had thought that it was destined for the Met. Philippe de Montebello recalls, “Larry Fleischman had been the first chairman of the Filodori”—the friends of the Greek and Roman Art Department. “And we were very interested in the collection.” But the Fleischmans’ relations with the Met had soured, and True had co-curated the travelling exhibition, which had a successful run at the Getty.

By late spring, 1996, the Getty was finalizing its agreement with the Fleischmans, who were paid twenty million dollars by the museum and made a tax-deductible donation of objects worth forty million. (True had no final say in the decision.) The more than three hundred works that the collection contained complemented the museum’s emphasis in Greek, Roman, and Etruscan art, and there also were many objects, such as small bronzes, in areas where the Getty was weak. And the works were of sufficient quality to allay fears that the Getty’s holdings would not be deep and expansive enough to justify the renovated villa.

The Fleischmans came out to Malibu to sign the contract in June. True recalls that they discussed the Paros house at breakfast: “Larry said, ‘Now that this is settled—the collection is going to the Getty—would it help if I lent you the money?’ ” The loan would be structured as a normal mortgage, Fleischman said, and the interest rate would be 8.25 per cent. True immediately agreed. “I did not consult with John Walsh or anyone else about this, as it seemed not to present the same issues as in ’94,” she says. “I did not see this as a conflict.”

One of True’s priorities at the Getty was to bring foreign scholars to Los Angeles to study the museum’s collection. In the early nineties, True invited Maria Lucia Ferruzza, a Sicilian archeologist, to work on a group of South Italian and Sicilian terra-cottas. “I told her, ‘Marion, I’m doing this report, but I’m an archeologist,’ ” Ferruzza recalls. “ ‘I’m working on these objects, trying to reconstruct their provenance; naturally, it’s possible that they could become subject to restitution claims.’ But she always gave me carte blanche.”

In fact, during the nineties the Getty did return a number of pieces that scholars or members of True’s own department identified as having been illegally removed from a particular site or collection in Italy. “These were years when no other American museum dreamed of returning anything,” Ferruzza recalls.

One object regarding which True and the Getty felt there was not a case for restitution, however, was the Aphrodite. After the acquisition, Getty researchers continued to study the statue, together with Italian scholars, but no archeological information came to light to pinpoint where it had been found. Moreover, the Italian government had never made a request for the object’s return, and True felt that the museum had already done what it could to follow up on the earlier rumors about the Morgantina site.

In 1996, a Swiss man named Renzo Canavesi wrote to the Getty to say that he was the previous owner of the Aphrodite who had sold it to Robin Symes. He claimed to have some fragments that fit the statue, implying that they had something to do with the right arm, and he included some low-quality photocopies of a photograph of what appeared to be the head. True, who had never heard of Canavesi before, was troubled. “My sense was that someone was trying to blackmail us,” she says. “Unless there was something he wanted from us, why was he suddenly coming forward, ten years later? If this was someone who wanted to help us understand where the sculpture came from, or give us background information, or help us understand the position of the arm, he would have written to say, ‘I would like to help the museum. I can tell you what I know about the sculpture.’ ” She wrote Canavesi a polite but noncommittal reply, and called Symes. “Symes was furious, because, generally, a dealer never wants his source to go directly to the museum,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I’ll find out and get back to you.’ ” True, meanwhile, shared her concerns with the Getty leadership, and the matter was dropped.

By this time, General Conforti had launched his large-scale investigation of the antiquities trade. He had followed the Getty and its purchases, and was particularly interested in the Aphrodite. In the early nineties, information obtained by the carabinieri, including testimony by the editor of Connoisseur, had been used to indict a group of Sicilians on charges of receiving and smuggling the statue, but the case was dropped for lack of evidence. Later, the carabinieri also turned up a scrawled receipt from Renzo Canavesi. The receipt, which recorded his sale of the statue to Symes for four hundred thousand dollars, stated suspiciously that the statue had been in the Canavesi family’s possession since 1939—the very year that Italy passed a landmark antiquities law.

In 1997, Conforti went to Los Angeles and met with Getty officials, including True. Despite his military rank and his police background—he was a Mafia investigator before taking over the art squad—Conforti saw himself as more of a cultural diplomat than a cop. He was given a tour of the new Getty Center, which was soon to open. (The opening exhibition, “Beyond Beauty: Antiquities as Evidence,” was curated by True and designed in part as a critique of the aesthetic approach in which she had been trained. The installation juxtaposed traditional displays of classical art, centered on groups of unrelated beautiful objects, with more recent archeological approaches; placards raised questions about authenticity and provenance, suggesting the inherent instability of knowledge about many museum artifacts.) Conforti attended a lunch with True, and presented her with a silver plate bearing the insignia of the carabinieri. “We were trying with this strategy to open a dialogue,” Conforti says. “You don’t go in with your guns drawn.” True, who wore an Armani pants suit for the occasion, recalls the meeting as theatre. “It all seemed like a kind of political game,” she says.

When I asked Conforti what impression he had taken away, he described the meeting as cordial but said that he had had misgivings about True and her suggestion to him that the Getty was willing to relinquish works of art: “It almost seemed like”—he switched from Italian to Virgil’s Latin—“ ‘I fear the Greeks even when they come bearing gifts.’ ”

In 1997, True attended Antiquities Without Provenance, a conference at the University of Viterbo, in the Lazio region of Italy. In one paper, an Italian archeologist named Maria Antonietta Rizzo described how a prized Getty wine cup depicting the sack of Troy, by the Greek painter Onesimos, had been reconstituted from batches of fragments acquired, on nine occasions between 1983 and 1990, from different dealers and by donation. With the help of the carabinieri, Rizzo had traced all the fragments to an illicit excavation in Cerveteri. “Will the P. Getty Museum, here represented in the person of Marion True . . . give back to Italy a work that has been trafficked in such an obvious way?” Rizzo asked.

Rizzo had not warned the Getty about her findings, and True was shocked. “The analysis was pretty damning,” True says. As a vase specialist, she had always assumed that collecting and matching fragments—a tradition that dates to the nineteenth century—was a vital part of museum work. “If there were fragments on the market by wonderful painters, I thought it was a really good thing to acquire them—especially if they joined vases in our collection.” The Getty’s 1995 acquisitions policy had even made an exception for such fragments, stating that they could be acquired without previous publication. Rizzo’s analysis showed that dealers had been gaming the system, by looting the fragments of an entire cup and then releasing them onto the market over time.

True felt that she had to respond immediately. She stood up and said that, if Rizzo would send her information to the Getty, the museum would undertake to return the work to Italy. In January, 1998, the Italian culture ministry presented the Getty with a dossier; a year later, the Getty, working with the ministry, arranged the return of the work, together with two pieces of Roman sculpture—a torso of Mithra and a stone head—that the museum had identified as belonging to Italy. The return of a work of Attic pottery of this importance had never been made by an American museum, and True accompanied the shipment to the Villa Giulia, in Rome, which houses the national museum of Etruscan art. “We arrived late at night, to deposit the objects at the museum, and returned the next morning for the opening of the crates,” True says. “The director of the Villa Giulia came down to see them, and there were various press people there.”

Not everyone was pleased, True recalls: “The carabinieri were unhappy, because every time we returned something we did it with the culture ministry.” The carabinieri remained interested in the Aphrodite and other objects still at the Getty, and True had not followed up with them, despite the warm reception Conforti had given her in Rome the previous year. True says, “They thought they would woo me, and, when I didn’t respond, they decided to slam me.”

Conforti denies that there was a rivalry with the ministry, but confirms that he was frustrated about the Aphrodite. “Our anger was, our investigations had given us the proof, but we couldn’t get what we wanted,” he says.

Conforti had also begun to work with Paolo Giorgio Ferri, the Rome prosecutor, and was learning more about True’s contacts with Medici and other dealers. At the Villa Giulia, Ferri confronted True. “I didn’t even know who he was—somebody told me he was a judge,” she recalls. “And he said to me, ‘Maybe next time you’ll give back the Morgantina Aphrodite.’ ” True briefly lost her composure. “I said, ‘Maybe next time there’ll be some evidence that it comes from Morgantina.’ Which, of course, I shouldn’t have.” (Ferri doesn’t recall discussing the Aphrodite.) Later that year, True attended a conference at Cambridge University on the trade in illicit antiquities, which was co-sponsored by the Getty. “The carabinieri were there,” she says. “One of them came up to me and said, ‘The General wants you to know that he still dreams of his Morgantina goddess!’ ”

In 1999, the Italian government asked the U.S. State Department to impose sweeping restrictions on the importation of classical antiquities. In exchange, Italy agreed to send more pieces abroad on long-term loan. The request, later approved, covered virtually every category of Greek, Roman, and Etruscan material, and True was the only American curator who publicly supported it. “We have been working over the past ten years to encourage closer collaboration with the government of Italy for loans, long-term loans, and exchange of material in lieu of collecting, and have modified our acquisition policy accordingly,” she explained in a hearing at the State Department, in the fall of that year. “An acquisition policy in this country has to deal with the issue of illicitly removed material.” She added, “I am here of my own free will, at my institution’s encouragement. There’s absolutely no pressure from the government of Italy, and there would be nothing gained by the Italian ministry putting pressure on us.”

On September 1, 2000, True was attending a classical-archeology conference in Berlin when she received a phone call from Richard Martin, a lawyer for the Getty. Martin told her that she was being targeted in an Italian criminal-conspiracy investigation related to looted antiquities. “I was so upset I couldn’t go to dinner,” True recalls. “That this was personally aimed at me, and not at the institution, was all the more astonishing. I had no objects, and I had no gain from the objects.” She flew back to Los Angeles the next day.

The investigation was tied to the discovery in Geneva, five years earlier, of the trove of photographs belonging to Giacomo Medici. True was the only curator who was named in the investigation, although works passed on by Medici had ended up at numerous museums, and some objects that the Getty had bought were acquired before True’s tenure began.

In a memo, Martin, who had experience working in Italy, surmised that the investigation was driven, in part, by ulterior aims. “In the past, General Conforti has sought return of several items which, upon analysis and review of our policies, the Getty concluded were not appropriate to return,” he wrote. “General Conforti has been frustrated by that position and by the Getty’s close relationship with the Ministero dei Beni Culturali—which received those items the Getty returned to Italy, with great media attention. . . . Accordingly, he has . . . a grudge to pursue against Dr. True and the Getty.”

By this point, Italian scholars had concluded that the limestone of the Aphrodite was Sicilian, and for the carabinieri the case was closed. In 2001, a Sicilian judge convicted Renzo Canavesi in absentia for receipt of stolen goods. The Getty, however, did nothing in response. “The Aphrodite was crying out for vengeance,” a former carabinieri officer says. “It was still at the museum.” (Canavesi’s conviction was later overturned, because the statute of limitations had expired.)

The photographs and documents discovered in Medici’s warehouse provided the carabinieri with various ways to go after the Getty. Not only did the museum have more than forty objects that appeared in photographs in Medici’s files; there were also True’s letters to Medici. As Martin observed in his memo, the Getty’s own records contained True’s “troublesome” correspondence with Hecht, Medici, and Symes, and also photographs of items offered for sale which were now known to be part of Medici’s hoard. By making True the object of a criminal investigation, the carabinieri could put a new kind of pressure on museums. “Marion True was the tip of the iceberg,” Ferri, the prosecutor, told me. “Many other curators in the past had had the same dealings she did. But I had more evidence—it was easier to go on trial with True.”

Although the letters were suggestive, they were insufficient to bring conspiracy charges against True. Martin, in his own confidential review of the Getty’s files, also concluded that none of the letters “amounts to proof of Dr. True’s knowledge that a particular item was illegally excavated or demonstrates her intent to join a conspiracy.”

But the carabinieri had long argued that museums used private collectors to launder antiquities, and Ferri was particularly interested in True’s relationship with the Fleischmans. True’s turn against the antiquities trade, and her frequent participation in archeology conferences about looting, had irritated her colleagues at other American museums, who had not been consulted about the Getty’s policy shift. “It was completely unilateral,” Philippe de Montebello told me. Critics were especially riled by the Getty’s acquisition of the Fleischman collection, just months after the 1995 policy was announced. The collection had been studied and published, as the new Getty rules required, but the vast majority of the objects had been written about only in the exhibition catalogue issued by the Getty itself, two years before the deal was made. In fact, in the subsequent carabinieri investigation more than ten works in the Fleischmans’ collection were traced to Medici.

In early 2002, Ferri put out an international arrest warrant for a Swiss dealer named Frida Tchacos Nussberger, who knew True, Symes, and the Fleischmans, and who was wanted in connection with an unrelated antiquities theft. She was arrested in Cyprus, and while she was detained she agreed to let Ferri interview her. At one point, Tchacos said of True, “Every time I showed her something, she said to me, ‘Beautiful, interesting, I can speak to Fleischman about it.’ . . . After that it was clear how things went between Fleischman [and] Marion True. . . . Dealers would offer things to Marion True, and she, as with me, would refuse or buy. . . . But with me she would refuse and then she would receive a phone call from Fleischman asking, ‘What do you have for me?’ . . . And so, after waiting many many months, perhaps years, reserving something for Marion True, Fleischman would enter into the game.” For Ferri, Tchacos’s statements confirm that the Fleischmans had been buying works on behalf of the Getty all along. “Frida was the missing link,” Ferri told me.

As part of her agreement with Ferri, Tchacos avoided conspiracy charges and was given a suspended sentence for handling smuggled goods; she was released on probation. Elsewhere in the interview, her words suggest that she has been coached by the prosecutor: “About Marion True, I can say something, yes. Marion True, I learned a lot about her by reading your . . . I didn’t know that Medici knew Marion True.”

True considers the allegations nonsensical. “By the time I met Larry Fleischman, he had a big collection, and many things he bought from Symes,” she says. “And I bought from Symes. So why did I need Fleischman to buy from Symes for me?” True believes that Tchacos’s statements reflect, in part, the general hostility dealers felt toward her after the Fleischman deal. “One of the immediate effects of our acquiring the Fleischman collection was that there were no antiquities purchases for four years,” she says. “One dealer said to Larry, ‘You took away my best client.’ ”

N ot long after True learned that Ferri was pursuing her, she tried to come to terms with the Italians. The prosecutor had provided the Getty with a list of forty-two objects at the museum that were included in his investigation, and in June, 2001, True gave him a voluntary, two-day deposition in Los Angeles, in which he showed her various photographs from the Medici raids. “It was very upsetting,” she says. “There was a photograph of the griffins”—a rare fourth-century-B.C. painted marble sculpture of two griffins killing a stag, which had been acquired before True’s tenure—“in the trunk of somebody’s car.” True recommended that the Getty take immediate action to return the griffins and some of the other works on Ferri’s list.

In 2002, a group of Getty officials travelled to Rome to meet with officials from the culture ministry and Conforti, who was about to retire. In the meeting, the Italians said that they wanted to approve all future purchases made by the Getty, and they asked that the Getty stop doing business with certain dealers; they also made clear that they were seeking the return of a number of works owned by the Getty, including the Aphrodite. But the Getty leadership balked at the restrictions and was not prepared to make a restitution offer. “They lost the chance to make a bella figura,” Conforti told me.

Three years later, just before True was indicted, the Getty finally offered to return three objects to Italy. But the offer did not include the griffins or the objects from the Fleischman collection on Ferri’s list. Barbara Fleischman, who became a trustee of the Getty in 2000, is furious about this. “If I had known of any questions about works in my husband’s collection, I would have said, ‘Send them back!’ ” she says. (In 2006, Fleischman resigned from the board to protest the museum’s failure to respond to the Italian investigation and defend True in the press.)

The Getty Villa was expected to open in November, 2005. True had spent years working on the installation, which she had organized thematically, rather than according to the usual dry chronology: “Dionysos and the Theatre,” “Athletes,” “Stories of the Trojan War,” “Women and Children.” It was an unabashedly aesthetic presentation, but it allowed viewers to draw lively connections between works of say, Greek and Roman or Greek and Etruscan civilization. Once the villa opened, True planned to retire; she also hoped to write a monograph on the Aphrodite, which was to be placed at the center of the “Gods and Goddesses” gallery, on the main floor.

On April 1, 2005, seven months before the fifteen-year villa project was to open, True was indicted in Rome.

At first, many of True’s colleagues in Europe brushed off the prosecution. “I remember someone telling me, ‘You’re not really important in Italy unless someone is investigating you,’ ” True recalls.

In the summer of 2005, however, the California attorney general opened an investigation of the Getty Trust, for misuse of funds. (In the end, no legal action was taken.) The Getty was in turmoil, and no one seemed to want to deal with True’s looming trial; she found herself increasingly isolated from the museum administration. Several years earlier, a lawyer in London who was investigating Symes, the dealer, passed on to Getty officials the story that Symes had paid for True’s house on Paros. At the time, True told the Getty, correctly, that the allegation was false, and the matter was dropped. In late September, 2005, however, the Symes story began circulating in the press. (When, later, it reached the Greek papers, True told me, “It was Michaelides”—Symes’s companion—“handing me the money.”) Getty officials confronted True, and she provided documents showing that she had a regular mortgage and that there had been no gift from Symes, but she disclosed that she had been referred to a Greek lender by Michaelides for the first loan, and that she had replaced it with the loan from the Fleischmans. True was found to be in violation of the Getty’s conflict-of-interest policy, and immediately suspended; on October 1, 2005, she resigned.

As True’s supporters saw it, the loan controversy was simply a way for the Getty to distance itself from her before the trial in Rome began. The immediate effect, though, was to help broaden the case against True and the Getty. Just a month after True’s departure from the Getty, according to Greek court documents, a carabinieri officer wrote an e-mail to a counterpart in Greece:

As you know this is a hot moment for our institutions to pursue museums and/or individual to return works of art illegally removed or exported from their country of origin. Yesterday we have repatriated three valuable objects returned “voluntarily” by the Getty. . . . The Italian prosecutor in charge for the investigation against Marion True, Robert Hecht, Giacomo Medici, Robin Symes, etc., told me that he is in possession of hot pieces of information that could be useful for the Greek authorities to investigate them.

That fall, the Greek government stepped up pressure on the Getty to return four objects, three of which had been acquired by True. The following spring, the Greek police staged their high-profile raids of True’s Paros house, and photographs of some items they confiscated appeared in the press. For much of the public, the transformation of True from distinguished museum impresario and advocate of ethics reform to unscrupulous conspirator was now complete.

Today, many of the reforms that True talked about in the nineties have taken hold. Over the past two years, other American museums have stopped buying unprovenanced antiquities, and several, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Met, have returned important pieces to Italy. Italy has meanwhile started allowing important works from its storerooms to travel to the United States, and Conforti himself has become an advocate of “long-term loans,” conceding that the illegal market of the eighties and nineties was encouraged by Italy’s restrictive policies. “It was prohibition, pure and simple,” he told me.

Yet True’s considerable influence on these developments has far less to do with her pronouncements and policy changes at the Getty than with the criminal case against her, which has unfolded mostly in the international press. Few people have actually witnessed the proceedings that intermittently take place—some twenty court dates over two years—in a nondescript courthouse near the Vatican, and which often have little to do with True. An air of amused detachment prevails in the courtroom. The codefendants are not required to attend, and True has rarely appeared, although Robert Hecht, a jovial autodidact and polyglot, has made a point of going to as many sessions as he can, and is fond of interrupting Ferri and his expert witnesses to correct art-historical mistakes.

At one hearing I attended in September, Giacomo Medici turned up. He was deeply tanned, with white sideburns and green-rimmed aviator glasses, and was wearing a polo shirt, tan trousers, and a large gold ring. He no longer sits in on the trial—at an earlier hearing, he quarrelled with a tombarolo, or grave robber, who was serving as a prosecution witness—but he likes to chat with reporters outside the courtroom. (“They haven’t produced one piece of evidence against me,” he told me.)

For all True’s efforts to reach an accommodation with the Mediterranean countries, the Getty has come out far worse than other museums that had long brushed off Italy’s repatriation efforts. By talking openly about the problems of the market, and acting to return pieces that hadn’t been requested, she attracted scrutiny of the rest of the collection. And the Getty’s retreat behind teams of lawyers during the investigation compounded the sense among Italian officials that the museum had something to hide. Although the Met has made far fewer concessions than the Getty, and makes no pretense about the importance of the market and private collectors to its impressive Greek and Roman collection, Philippe de Montebello has been praised in Italy for a deal that he negotiated, in person, in early 2006, to return the Euphronios krater and twenty other pieces, in exchange for long-term loans of the museum’s choosing. “Naturally, he must defend the interests of his museum,” Conforti told me. “But he played the game cleanly.”

Among Italian scholars and archeologists who knew True in the nineties, few are willing to speculate on her guilt or innocence. But several expressed dismay at the waning of the collegial, scholarly approach that True tried to establish a decade ago. “We are returning to the position ‘You have to return these things to us because they are ours,’ ” Adriano La Regina told me. “It’s not as if the returned objects suddenly gain a provenance. It’s in bad taste, the way these objects are presented as masterpieces. They come back to us without any more contextual meaning than they had in the United States.”

This is particularly true in the case of the cult statue of Aphrodite. In August, after more than eighteen months of negotiation, the Getty agreed to return the sculpture to Italy, along with several dozen other objects cited in the True case. For the carabinieri, the agreement was an acknowledgment, after years of resistance by the Getty, that the work had been looted from Morgantina. When the work returns to Italy, in 2010, it will likely be installed in Aidone, a tiny town near the site.

But the Getty’s decision to return the sculpture had little to do with the carabinieri’s Morgantina theory, which Getty officials say is no more certain than before. The decision was made because investigators hired by the Getty found evidence that calls into question the story told by Renzo Canavesi, whom they interviewed twice, and suggests that the work was looted in recent decades. All of which has left scholars in something of a quandary. Malcolm Bell, the longtime director of excavations at Morgantina, continues to find no valid archeological evidence that the cult statue came from the site. He spent part of the past summer interviewing local residents, several of whom have lived in direct view of Morgantina for decades; he didn’t find any clear indication of a major statue coming to light. Bell also doubts that the statue depicts Aphrodite. Citing the figure’s extraordinary windblown garments, which reveal the contours of her body, Bell believes that it is probably a depiction of Hera, Zeus’s wife, on Mt. Ida. Hera was trying to seduce Zeus, in order to allow the Greeks to capture Troy. Such a statue, Bell suggests, would have been installed in a major temple in one of the larger Sicilian cities. “Until we know exactly where it came from, it will be impossible to identify the goddess with certainty,” Bell told me. He is hoping that the mystery will be solved in the next two years, before the statue is permanently banished to Aidone.

With the Getty deal in hand, the Italian culture ministry has announced that it is withdrawing as a civil party in the case against True; to some, this suggests that the lawsuit was less about curatorial misdeeds than about coveted objects. In Athens, meanwhile, one of the charges that True trafficked Greek antiquities was thrown out in late November. And although the criminal case in Italy continues, Ferri has signalled that he hopes for a rapid conclusion—possibly as early as next spring—in which both sides can save face. “It will not be an acquittal,” he predicted. Ferri also told me, “There’s no reason to go on in the outrage against Marion True. The more the trial goes on, the more outrage. It’s better to reach a judgment.”

After the Greek raids, True and her husband contemplated selling the house on Paros, but their friends on the island have remained loyal, and they have reconsidered. When I arrived, they had just cut down some old bamboo that lined the driveway, and the cement was drying on a new wall in front of the house. True said, “It gives us the sense that we are reclaiming it, that we are invested in staying here.”

The confiscated stone objects and architectural fragments, which remain in police custody, were in the house and were shown to a local archeology official when she bought it; old stones found on the island are often incorporated into Paros houses, and the official deemed them of too little value to require registration. Referring to a stone projecting from the living-room wall, True said, “This one they didn’t dare take out, because the structural engineer said the whole house could fall down.” Although True has not been charged in Greece with possession of the objects, they have been discussed in the Rome trial, as evidence that True herself was collecting antiquities. When I asked Ferri about this, he said, “It’s prova di contorno”—information to adorn the edges of his case. “The Greek evidence is not strong enough, but it can have some impact before the court.”

I asked True one afternoon whether her belief in the value of museums had changed. “I think it is very hard for people raised in a technological age to understand how individuals millennia ago achieved with their hands objects of unbelievable beauty,” she said. “Why are we moved by a Cycladic idol? We don’t even know what it means or what it was used for. You look at the gorgeous Harpist”—a renowned Getty idol—“and you say, ‘The person who thought to create this out of a single block of marble with nothing but bronze and emery tools!’ It hasn’t been surpassed. There are other things that can be equally good, but it’s never been surpassed in terms of artistic achievement. And a young child can walk into the institution today and see the beauty in it as much as somebody who knew why it was created six millennia ago.

“But if we don’t show those things, and we don’t interpret them, and we don’t use them to educate people, what are they surrounded by? Plastic and bad design and things that have no aesthetic quality at all.”

Throughout hours of questions about her trial and the charges against her, True was calm and collected. When I suggested that we go to a nearby museum to look at art, though, she became emotional. “I can’t go to museums anymore,” she said. ♦